SAF here and gone

Just a quick follow-up on the interesting and somewhat spectral phenomenon that was the Singapore Arts Festival Village 2011. As mentioned below, the project was a dream-like tent city that was built in Esplanade Park to house the various programs and performances of the Festival. It was designed as a meandering skin of the informal scaffolding seen in many of Singapore’s more humble construction sites. Posts of bitangor timber were lashed to cover a “village” of irregular forms–memory figures, in fact–which were then canvased internally and lit. A large floor of old timber battens was placed above the grass, and a strange kind of urbanism presented itself for a month: too formal to be an event tentage, and yet not finished to the standard that Singapore expects of its public spaces. A kind of shanty for the arts. You can see the overall elevation above, and some images from the built result below.

The SAF Village provoked some interesting reactions, in particular from a number of Singaporean artists who felt that its appearance and semi-formalized aspect had a kind of surreal effect. Of course, we were happy to hear this. The Village was also described in the September issue of Monocle Magazine.

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